this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Mastodon Exit Interview (v.cx)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to BlueSky for text-centric social media.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But that doesn't matter to a new user who doesn't know about lemmy-federate. They probably won't be able to immediately find users/posts/communities they want to see and will have to go through that process

That's not how it works, lemmy-federate is something an instance admin enrolls in and it preemptively connects to new communities on other instances. The individual user doesn't have to do anything, provided their instance is signed up for lemmy-federate.

There are still plenty of other discoverability issues though, and it could absolutely be said that this type of functionality should maybe not be delegated to third-party software.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's not how it works, lemmy-federate is something an instance admin enrolls in and it preemptively connects to new communities on other instances. The individual user doesn't have to do anything, provided their instance is signed up for lemmy-federate.

The admin signs up for lemmy-federate and lemmy-federate then pulls in all communities from that instance into lemmy-federate, right? ~~Is the admin's instance subscribed to lemmy-federate and pulling in all the communities lemmy-federate knows about?~~ The site says it uses bots to follow the communities. That seems to imply the admin has to host the bot on their own instance in order to get the communities to federate over to their instance.

and it could absolutely be said that this type of functionality should maybe not be delegated to third-party software

I don't even think its necessarily an issue that its third-party software (though building it into the actual instances would be better). The main issue is it's a one-off, centralized service. If lemmy-federate goes down, we're back to square one. If we want to avoid that, we have to have other relays; but now to avoid duplicating work these relays have to implement lemmy-federate's API so fedivese software doesn't have to deal with multiple relay APIs. We could have been using ActivityPub for relays from the beginning, but they're always an afterthought and nobody is interested in standardizing them. The fediverse was using relays before ActivityPub, then mastodon made new relays for ActivityPub once they realized the discoverability problem (it seems like they were never advertised/used widely because discovery is still a problem on microblogging platforms), and now the threadiverse is making its own relays instead of extending the existing ones, and none of the relays work across the microblogging/forum boundary

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If lemmy-federate goes down, we’re back to square one.

No, because Lemmy-federate is only supposed to be used as a "first subscriber" for a community.

Once there are other subscribers to that community from the remote instance, then the lemmy-federate could go down, the federation would still be in place.

Example

  • [email protected] is first federated thanks to lemmy-federate to my instance (dbzer0)
  • I see that community and subscribe
  • Lemmy-federate goes down
  • As I am still subscribed to that community, dbzer0 still federates that community
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

No, because Lemmy-federate is only supposed to be used as a "first subscriber" for a community.

Yes, I know but any communities/instances created after that are still in the undiscoverable situation

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

The code is on Github: https://github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-federate

Should lemmy-federate go down, someone else would set another one up.